


the color of dark rust, or dried blood

by tartanfics



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Gen, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-19 18:40:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1479976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tartanfics/pseuds/tartanfics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ice turns to water, and water causes iron to rust. </p>
<p>The Winter Soldier is rusting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the color of dark rust, or dried blood

**Author's Note:**

> Title and epigraph from [Because I cannot remember my first kiss](https://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23752) by Roger Bonair-Agard.

         _And I sat there running my hands back_  
         _and forth_  
 _over the short smooth hairs of the fabric_  
 _and understanding what touch meant_  
 _for the first time—_

-

The Soldier is rusting. 

He lies on the bed in a motel room in a city. It doesn't matter which city, because none of them mean anything to him when he doesn't need to compare the map in his head to the pavement, or know how long it would take him to fly to any other otherwise meaningless city. 

Like a weapon in an armory when there is no one left to pick him up and aim him, the Soldier is rusting.

It eventually becomes clear that he is rusting because he has never gone so long unfrozen, and he is beginning to melt. The ice turns to water, and water causes iron to rust.

There's nothing in him but iron and ice, and as he lies on the bed in the motel room the little he has is turning to rust.

-

He begins to have a body again. The rust flakes away; holes form. What was an iron core is revealed as a shell, and whatever's beneath is beginning to peek through. He has a stomach. He knows what that is but doesn't remember feeling it before. It's hungry, or maybe sick.

He puts his feet on the floor. They still work. The iron around his bones wasn't all that was holding him up after all.

Outside the sunlight hurts his eyes. He walks away from the motel. When his mind reaches for the file on his mission and the maps it contains, it touches not paper but some kind of junk drawer. The file is replaced by street signs, monuments, coffee cups, cherry blossoms. Useless. He stands on a street corner and squints at the sunlight and traffic; he doesn't know where he is. He is in a city with a name: Washington.

He checks his pockets, as if they might contain the files missing from his brain. No, only money.

He buys a hat from a souvenir shop. Across the counter, the man counting his change is alive. Parts of his body light up in the Soldier's vision--throat, temple, chest--but as the Soldier watches the light dims. The metal pathways in his brain that could have told him how to kill this man are rusting too.

He's still hungry, so he buys a hot dog from a cart on a street corner. He watches with the kind of attention he used to give the vulnerable parts of a target's body: yellow mustard dripping down the end of the hot dog and over his wrist. He can feel it on his skin. He licks it off.

He walks for a long time, because moving around a city for which he doesn't have a map is disturbing. Being disturbed is like the feeling of having a stomach or squinting into sunlight. It's not something he had, before the iron started to rust.

After nine hours he walks back to the motel and lies down the bed. This time, he sleeps.

-

There's a poster with a familiar face on it. The Captain is the only part of this mission file still remaining, and he's in a museum.

The Soldier walks until he sees the monumental facade of the National Museum of American History. This morning he got off the bed and walked into the bathroom and discovered that he has a face, the way he has a stomach and feet. He didn't recognize himself, but he could watch as he opened his mouth and closed it again.

His feet take him into the museum, past all the red, white, and blue signs.

He recognizes his face this time. It's in the museum next to the Captain. The laughter distorts it, makes recognition difficult, but it's a lot like the face in the mirror.

He looks at it for a long time. Eventually he tries the mirror trick, attempts a smile, a laugh. It doesn't come easy enough to make him sure, but more rust is flaking away.

Through the holes in the iron, he can see hints of a name, but he can't tell if it was there to begin with or if it's slipping out of the museum and in through the holes, planted.

James Buchanan Barnes. That might be his, but he's too rusty still to tell. 

-

The Captain might be his too--not the target from the missing file, but his under the iron, his under the ice. He doesn't know yet. 

He waits and he watches, outside an apartment building, outside a house, until he knows that the apartment belongs to Black Widow and the house to the Falcon. 

He follows the Captain, at a distance that is more than not-being-seen, until his feet know the routine of an almost-normal life. All the walking has worn away the rust there; his feet and his stomach are the first parts of him he's sure are really his. He follows the Captain to the grocery store, to a barber shop; watches as he runs laps with the Falcon. The Soldier watches until he can't tell anymore whether the Captain is just a target, just a man in a museum, or _his_ , part of his body-under-the-iron like his stomach. He can't feel the Captain there the way he can feel his stomach when it's hungry, but that may not mean anything.

Black Widow sees him watching before the Captain does. They're walking on a street lined with stores that sell things the Soldier doesn't recognize, when she wraps her fingers around the Captain's wrist and pulls him sideways into an alley.

He's been made. The Soldier slips away into the crowd.

-

The arm isn't his. He can move it, make it respond the way his mouth does when he checks it against the mirror, but it's not _his_. It's all iron, and it doesn't rust the way the rest of him does. There's nothing underneath. He can reach out and touch a thing, pick up his hat or a shoe or a spoon, and he can feel the weight of it, but that's all.

When he takes a shower in the cramped square shower stall in the motel, his feet slide against a slimy patch next to the drain. He can feel the temperature, the texture, the wet-slippery, a vague sense of disgust. But when he reaches out with the arm to brace himself against the tiled wall, there's nothing. Just a vague sense of mass against his body, just the difference between air and not-air.

-

He's still rusting, and the rust is still flaking away in uneven patches, the holes not yet big enough to let anything that matters in or out, when he sits down on a bench and waits.

The Captain is running again. He's alone. The Falcon is away on a mission.

The Soldier takes his hat off and squints into the sunlight. He waits. He's rusted enough to know that most of what was underneath the iron is corroded too, that he cannot keep existing with only his feet and his stomach and the sun in his eyes. The world outlined by his mission file is gone. The world underneath is gone too, and the Captain might or might not be his.

So he sits on a bench and waits.

The Captain slows to a jog, to a walk. He looks up at the Soldier, and more rust flakes away--just enough to let a hitherto-unknown emotion sweep through the holes like a corrosive tidal wave. Terror. 

The Soldier jerks upright, puts his weight on the feet-that-are-his and stumbles around the bench.

"Bucky!"

The voice punches another corrosive hole in the iron, but it only lets the terror in deeper. He runs. 

-

A knock on the door of the motel he's still staying at--which isn't secure, which isn't protocol; he should have moved but hasn't.

He's lying on the bed again. He sits up, puts his feet on the floor. He opens the door.

The Captain stands on the other side of the door, looking taller than he should (the mission file would have had accurate height-weight-photographs-descriptions, so _why_ \--but the mission file was one of the first things to rust). He smiles. It looks difficult (the Soldier found it difficult). He holds something out.

"You forgot your hat."

The Soldier takes it. He bought it and it's his, so he takes it. He holds it in his right hand, the one that's skin and the rusty remnants of iron and ice. The hat is made of cotton. He doesn't remember noticing that before. He runs his thumb back and forth over the brim, and realizes that this hand has become his. The other one's not and never will be, but this one is his, the way his feet are his and his stomach and his mouth-in-the-mirror.

"Bucky--" the Captain tries to say.

He turns the hat over in his hand, feeling the texture of it, touching it for the first time. "That's not mine. That name," he says.

It's not. But like his feet and his stomach and his eyes squinting into the sun and his hand--it might be eventually. When the ice melts and the iron rusts.


End file.
